Existing computer network systems utilize an access management system to control the access to various applications and documents. These systems include various components such as an enterprise access management (EAM) system which may store policy information. The policy information describes various security settings for applications and documents protected by the EAM system. The security settings may include authorization attributes for various users who are allowed to access the secured applications. The EAM system securely maintains and implements authentication, authorization and audit (AAA) procedures for each user in conformance with established policy configurations to ensure that only approved services from within the secured domain are provided to users who meet or have the appropriate security clearance.
In particular, existing computer network systems are set up such that requests from users are received by the application servers themselves in the secured network. The application server may contain a software-based access management server agent (EAM agent) which allows the application server to directly communicate with the EAM server, which then conducts the AAA procedure. In one instance of this deployment, for each access request sent from the user, the EAM agent of the application server will communicate the user's information to the EAM server. The EAM server will then evaluate the access policy associated with the application that the user is trying to access and will return the result of the evaluation to the application server. Based on the received result from the EAM server, the application server may allow or deny the user access to the application.
In common deployment, the EAM systems and traffic management systems are two different disparate systems and are not aware of each other. Due to load balancing and traffic handling parameters, a computer network system which contains several application servers in the secured network domain requires each application server to have an EAM agent to allow the application servers to effectively communicate with the EAM server(s). This is burdensome and expensive to administer; raises challenges with regard to interoperability and scalability; and lacks security.
What is needed is a network traffic management device that is configured to implement an EAM agent which allows the network traffic management device to communicate with the EAM server to receive policy information and have AAA functionality while effectively performing traffic management operations.
While these examples are susceptible of embodiments in many different forms, there is shown in the drawings and will herein be described in detail preferred examples with the understanding that the present disclosure is to be considered as an exemplification and is not intended to limit the broad aspect to the embodiments illustrated.